Information, Interindustry Dynamics, and the Service Industries

Abstract

To understand the role of services in the interindustrial system, themes common to explanations in the literature on the increase in prominence of services are explored. Four related themes are suggested by the outcome. Growth in services is associated with increases in the demand for information, in instability, in complexity, and in externalities. These suggest a synthesis of the explanations for subsequent modeling of the role of services by means of the Sequential Interindustry Model (SIM), developed for examining transient processes. Services are viewed as distributive, servicing, and informative, each group with a successively larger information portion relative to materials in its output. System regulation by information flows is presented. With the focus on informative service industries, in response to perturbations these services inform producers, facing imperfect market information, of the adjustments necessary in order to approach equilibrium.